I am a designer and developer and content strategist. I use my experience as a magazine art director and web editor to help publishers, marketers, non-profits and self-branded individuals tell their stories in words and images. I follow all of the technologies that relate to the content business and try to identify the opportunities and pitfalls that these technologies pose. At the same time I am immersed in certain sectors through my content practice and am always looking to find connections between the worlds of neurology, economics, entertainment, travel and mobile technology. I live near the appropriately-scaled metropolis of Portland, Maine, and participate in its innovation economy (more stories at liveworkportland.org. A more complete bio and samples of my design work live at wingandko.com.

You’ve heard about the Leap Motion. You know that it’s about the size of a flash drive, available for pre-order, shipping in December or January and costs only $70. You know that it’s 200 times more accurate than the Kinect, can distinguish all ten of your fingers individually and track your movements to a 1/100th of a millimeter.

If you’ve seen the demo (above), you know that it will be amazing for drawing, intuitively scrolling web pages, directly manipulating maps and totally transformative for games. You know it will vastly increase your score in Fruit Ninja.

What may not have occurred to you is that the Leap is heralding the next era of user interface and user experience. As it says on the Leap’s website, “This is like day one of the mouse. Except, no one needs an instruction manual for their hands.” This new day is the full realization of the natural user interface (NUI) which today’s touch interfaces are only but the dawning . The MIT Technology Review calls it, “The Most Important New Technology Since the Smart Phone.” To get a deeper idea of how it feels to work with, watch the hands-on demo from The Verge, below.

What strikes me the most watching this, is how Leap CTO David Holz refers to this technology as creating a virtual touch surface that can be interpreted by existing touch interfaces. “Any application made for touch just works… you can get backwards compatibility with ‘legacy’ touch applications.” Consumer touch applications have not been around that long (the iPhone just turned five), so it’s kind of disorienting to hear such recent technology now referred to as “legacy,” but such is the speed of change. It’s similar to when I hear mobile designers talk about the “traditional” desktop web. Traditional to me still means, you know, books!

But the “legacy” point really drives home how different this level of gesture recognition is from anything that has come before. As Christopher Mims points out in his Technology Review article, “Unlike a touchscreen interface, with the Leap, there’s no friction. That sounds trivial, but it isn’t. It’s the difference between attempting to conduct a symphony with a wand and attempting to conduct the same symphony by sketching out what the orchestra should do next via chalk on a blackboard.” Nicely put. The other important difference is that the Leap recognizes gestures in three dimensions. So instead of just pinching and swiping, there’s pushing, pulling, grabbing, shaking, etc. and the ability do do more than one of those simultaneously. “Forget pinch-to-zoom;,” writes Mims, “imagine ‘push to scroll,’ rotating your flattened hand to control the orientation of an object with a full six degrees of freedom, or using both hands at once to control either end of a bezier surface you’re casually sculpting as part of an object you’ll be sending to your 3D printer.” Very cool.

But even more significant, I think, is the resolution of the gesture recognition. In the same way that higher resolution screens are referred to (correctly or not) as “retinal,” the Leap’s 1/100th of a millimeter spatial resolution can be considered “visceral,” indistinguishable from the response of a physical thing.

Leap is counting on developers to get (really) excited about developing for the device, and they envision a dedicated app store as well as geographically based Leap Community Hubs, that “bring developers closer together in areas where they can both strengthen their own work and the efforts of those in their community.” The company reported on their blog that they have shipped the first software development kits to a hand-picked group of alpha testers selected from a long list of applicants, with more to be distributed in larger and larger waves as the kinks get ironed out.

For those of you just dying to interact with your data like Tony Stark, it is a short wait until being a super hero (or industrial magnate) is no longer required.

Bonus Round: This video shows the scene in Minority Report that launched all these ships.

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Touch is hugely popular because it is about direct manipulation. This tech looks more similar to mousing (indirect manipulation) than it does touch. It’ll be a nice enhancement to other UIs, but it will most definitely not make touch “legacy”.

You clearly do not understand this technology as it is “direct manipulation” supercharged. When you factor in distance to or from the device being greatly expanded, plus adding the fact that dirt, grease, or a host of other substances that now won’t present an obstacle to hardware, this technology most definitely WILL make touch “legacy”.

Whether it be new motion controlled televisions (everybody becomes their own remote) or mobile apps (cars, motorcycles, etc…) or computers in kitchens and auto shops… nobody is going to care where the remote control, keyboard, or mouse is since it *is* you. Plus having dirty or (by design) clean hands won’t inhibit users who cannot get their keyboard/mouse/input method dirty or their hands dirty by design.